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Paths to Otherwhere
Attempting to save humankind from a genocidal threat, the scientists of the twenty-first century discover a vast alternative universe in which the wars of the twentieth century had different outcomes. Reprint.
405 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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About the author
James P. Hogan
111 books265 followersJames Patrick Hogan was a British science fiction author.
Hogan was was raised in the Portobello Road area on the west side of London. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he worked various odd jobs until, after receiving a scholarship, he began a five-year program at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough covering the practical and theoretical sides of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. He first married at the age of twenty, and he has had three other subsequent marriages and fathered six children.
Hogan worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually moved into sales in the 1960s, travelling around Europe as a sales engineer for Honeywell. In the 1970s he joined the Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group and in 1977 moved to Boston, Massachusetts to run its sales training program. He published his first novel, Inherit the Stars, in the same year to win an office bet. He quit DEC in 1979 and began writing full time, moving to Orlando, Florida, for a year where he met his third wife Jackie. They then moved to Sonora, California.
Hogan's style of science fiction is usually hard science fiction. In his earlier works he conveyed a sense of what science and scientists were about. His philosophical view on how science should be done comes through in many of his novels; theories should be formulated based on empirical research, not the other way around. If a theory does not match the facts, it is theory that should be discarded, not the facts. This is very evident in the Giants series, which begins with the discovery of a 50,000 year-old human body on the Moon. This discovery leads to a series of investigations, and as facts are discovered, theories on how the astronaut's body arrived on the Moon 50,000 years ago are elaborated, discarded, and replaced.
Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian social views. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian themes, often promoting the idea that new technological advances render certain social conventions obsolete. For example, the effectively limitless availability of energy that would result from the development of controlled nuclear fusion would make it unnecessary to limit access to energy resources. In essence, energy would become free. This melding of scientific and social speculation is clearly present in the novel Voyage from Yesteryear (strongly influenced by Eric Frank Russell's famous story "And Then There Were None"), which describes the contact between a high-tech anarchist society on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, with a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government. The story uses many elements of civil disobedience.
James Hogan died unexpectedly from a heart attack at his home in Ireland.
Hogan was was raised in the Portobello Road area on the west side of London. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he worked various odd jobs until, after receiving a scholarship, he began a five-year program at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough covering the practical and theoretical sides of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. He first married at the age of twenty, and he has had three other subsequent marriages and fathered six children.
Hogan worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually moved into sales in the 1960s, travelling around Europe as a sales engineer for Honeywell. In the 1970s he joined the Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group and in 1977 moved to Boston, Massachusetts to run its sales training program. He published his first novel, Inherit the Stars, in the same year to win an office bet. He quit DEC in 1979 and began writing full time, moving to Orlando, Florida, for a year where he met his third wife Jackie. They then moved to Sonora, California.
Hogan's style of science fiction is usually hard science fiction. In his earlier works he conveyed a sense of what science and scientists were about. His philosophical view on how science should be done comes through in many of his novels; theories should be formulated based on empirical research, not the other way around. If a theory does not match the facts, it is theory that should be discarded, not the facts. This is very evident in the Giants series, which begins with the discovery of a 50,000 year-old human body on the Moon. This discovery leads to a series of investigations, and as facts are discovered, theories on how the astronaut's body arrived on the Moon 50,000 years ago are elaborated, discarded, and replaced.
Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian social views. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian themes, often promoting the idea that new technological advances render certain social conventions obsolete. For example, the effectively limitless availability of energy that would result from the development of controlled nuclear fusion would make it unnecessary to limit access to energy resources. In essence, energy would become free. This melding of scientific and social speculation is clearly present in the novel Voyage from Yesteryear (strongly influenced by Eric Frank Russell's famous story "And Then There Were None"), which describes the contact between a high-tech anarchist society on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, with a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government. The story uses many elements of civil disobedience.
James Hogan died unexpectedly from a heart attack at his home in Ireland.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 12, 2024
This is a hard-science novel that goes into detail about speculative quantum mechanics and alternate worlds and DNA research against a thriller/suspense backdrop of impending global warfare due to political extremism. It's mostly a gripping read, though Hogan indulges himself in too much political theory and philosophy at the expense of character development.
May 5, 2017
James P. Hogan's novel starts out in a world heading towards crisis. In a not-too-distant future, the United States is slowly rotting from within, with revolutionaries and gangs forcing an authoritarian reaction from the government. As an increasingly likely conflict with Japan and China looms, scientists develop a device that heralds the prospect of improving decision-making by allowing users to tap into the infinite number of decisions made by their multitude of counterparts in alternate worlds, thus discovering the wisest course of action. But then the scientists discover a means of transporting a person's consciousness into their counterpart in another universe. As the scientists begin to explore the possibilities, though, the military prepares to move in and use the device for their own ends.
Like his earlier novel The Proteus Operation, Hogan provides a plot of considerable interest, one well grounded in scientific theory as befitting an author of hard SF. Yet character development is lost amid the considerable political commentating the author continually engages in, as he uses his premise to both offer his theory on the failings of our world (too much government) and construct an idyllic alternative that in which everything is perfect (thanks to limited government). Some of it is laughable (as in how Britain manages to have socialized medicine without government), much of it demonstrates a poor understanding of human history, and all of it gets in the way of the suspense Hogan attempts to build throughout the novel. It makes for an annoying read, one that would have been better is there had been less of Hogan's political views and more focus on the characters and some of the interesting implications of his premise.
Like his earlier novel The Proteus Operation, Hogan provides a plot of considerable interest, one well grounded in scientific theory as befitting an author of hard SF. Yet character development is lost amid the considerable political commentating the author continually engages in, as he uses his premise to both offer his theory on the failings of our world (too much government) and construct an idyllic alternative that in which everything is perfect (thanks to limited government). Some of it is laughable (as in how Britain manages to have socialized medicine without government), much of it demonstrates a poor understanding of human history, and all of it gets in the way of the suspense Hogan attempts to build throughout the novel. It makes for an annoying read, one that would have been better is there had been less of Hogan's political views and more focus on the characters and some of the interesting implications of his premise.
August 16, 2019
multiverse and pararrel world is intriguing .
June 3, 2023
Wow! This thriller will have you wondering who you are and who you might be! When this world is self destructing, a project is started at Berkeley University, and when the project is a success, they go further with it. What if there were a one of you in other Universes and there was a way to meet the other you’d? When this aspect is advanced further and further, it has to be kept a secret to prevent the government and politics out of it. If the work is going to work for the good of all the universes, only a handful of people can know. But when it falls into the wrong hands, can any body or any world be saved, or was all the work for nothing, or worse…used to destroy. This is a great book that will make you look at things differently
February 11, 2025
3.5 stars.
Reading this book a couple decades after publication probably helped with understanding the quantum physics ideas presented here, as I've been reading about this things in the present as they become realized science rather than the mostly speculative in this book. One of my favorite books happens to be Hogan's Voyage Into Yesteryear. This book shares the same basic ideas re: politics, a near-utopian society, and the attempts by the power-hungry to corrupt and usurp said near-utopia. These ideas have been dropped into a new setting and plot, but otherwise is quite similar in ideas presented. I do feel the book took about half-way to get started and character-development could have been a bit more, but otherwise an interesting read.
Reading this book a couple decades after publication probably helped with understanding the quantum physics ideas presented here, as I've been reading about this things in the present as they become realized science rather than the mostly speculative in this book. One of my favorite books happens to be Hogan's Voyage Into Yesteryear. This book shares the same basic ideas re: politics, a near-utopian society, and the attempts by the power-hungry to corrupt and usurp said near-utopia. These ideas have been dropped into a new setting and plot, but otherwise is quite similar in ideas presented. I do feel the book took about half-way to get started and character-development could have been a bit more, but otherwise an interesting read.
February 1, 2020
Hard to believe this book was written in 1996, with all the current advances in Quantum Physics. What might have been plausible then seems to be more probable now. This is what real hardcore science fiction is all about. The story line is interesting and entertaining from the first page. It quickly becomes a page turner till the end. A lot of characters to keep track of, not so much the main characters and their double identities, but more so the marginal ones. I like characters that are well fleshed out which Hogan does really well with the main characters and their doubles. The science is right there at the core of the story not as a backdrop to keep the narrative moving forward.
April 21, 2010
The quote on the cover proclaims Hogan the "Dean of hard SF." I'd think Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven better fits the title, but reading the book, even if he doesn't head the department, he definitely works there. This novel really does deal with a lot of fascinating and big ideas, and it isn't hand-waving Bat-science either in this book about the concept of the Multiverse. I can't recall ever reading a more lucid explanation of the paradoxes that inspired quantum physics. And from that hard physics foundation, Hogan spins a lot of implications biological, political and spiritual. It's well-written too, even if hardly literary fiction--all the science, for instance, is conveyed without of feeling of infodump.
Yet I'm rating this only three stars and putting it in the box of books to sell, give away or throw out. That's not because I would not recommend it to fans of hard science fiction, but I don't feel it's a keeper either. I'd read this before some years ago but couldn't remember one thing about it before rereading. In contrast, decades after reading them, I could remember the characters and events in Herbert's Dune, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, even short stories by Isaac Asimov only by their titles. The main reason this book is getting purged from my collection is that I can't imagine I'll want to read it again. Its writing doesn't evoke writer's envy, it doesn't have characters or a world I love such as with Lois Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga or Anne McCaffrey's Pern such as it would make a good comfort read. It's an entertaining book--just not one I could read over and over again or that I see as exceptional--and it wasn't as fun to read as the Hogan book I read just before this one, Realtime Interrupt (or Code of the Lifemaker, which I later reread).
Yet I'm rating this only three stars and putting it in the box of books to sell, give away or throw out. That's not because I would not recommend it to fans of hard science fiction, but I don't feel it's a keeper either. I'd read this before some years ago but couldn't remember one thing about it before rereading. In contrast, decades after reading them, I could remember the characters and events in Herbert's Dune, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, even short stories by Isaac Asimov only by their titles. The main reason this book is getting purged from my collection is that I can't imagine I'll want to read it again. Its writing doesn't evoke writer's envy, it doesn't have characters or a world I love such as with Lois Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga or Anne McCaffrey's Pern such as it would make a good comfort read. It's an entertaining book--just not one I could read over and over again or that I see as exceptional--and it wasn't as fun to read as the Hogan book I read just before this one, Realtime Interrupt (or Code of the Lifemaker, which I later reread).
March 24, 2013
This story had a lot of potential, started out quite interestingly indeed. Sadly, it suffers from what I call Sawyerism - taken from Robert J. Sawyer's tendency to end cracking scientific novels with transhumanic or Utopian Nirvana-like happy ever afters. Not that I can say Sawyer did it first, of course, but I encountered it first with him.
On the other hand, there were some very good bits: the science was fun, the Human observation good too, especially at the end of chapter twenty-four, and the single word slip that gives the game away in chapter forty-two was also very, very clever. Shame about the end.
On the other hand, there were some very good bits: the science was fun, the Human observation good too, especially at the end of chapter twenty-four, and the single word slip that gives the game away in chapter forty-two was also very, very clever. Shame about the end.
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October 21, 2007http://nhw.livejournal.com/59345.html[return][return]Though the style is a little bald, the ideas are great - scientists research into parallel universes, discover that one of them is a utopia; how does this change them and the intelligence agencies who are monitoring their activities?
January 18, 2012
Alternate history, people crossing into parallel dimensions, government corruption.. what's not to like? This was well written, and entertaining from start to end. I'd recommend this to anyone who likes at least the first two things mentioned in the first sentence.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews